Efforts to stop lead poisoning could be at risk

USA Today, Sept, 18, 2013

By Liz Szabo

Budget cuts could prevent health officials from protecting kids from lead poisoning.
Pediatricians and public-health advocates are working to revive programs to protect children from lead poisoning, after what they describe as a series of devastating blows to their efforts.

Congress all but eliminated federal funding to prevent lead poisoning in 2012, cutting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s lead budget by more than 90%. There is no safe level of lead, the CDC estimates that 535,000 American kids have enough lead in their blood to put them at high risk for lead poisoning, which causes intellectual impairments and behavioral problems.
Although lead is no longer used in gasoline or paint, many children are still exposed by living in old housing with peeling paint. USA TODAY also has documented the hazards to children from shuttered lead smelting factories, which left layers of lead in backyards and playgrounds across the USA.
“It’s like they’re declaring victory in a war that has not been won,” says Jerome Paulson, a professor at the George Washington University School of Medicine, who chairs the American Academy of Pediatrics’ committee on environmental health.
The American Academy of Pediatrics is circulating a petition among its members, asking them to urge national leaders to restore funding to prevent lead poisoning. The academy expects to send the petition — addressed to President Obama, CDC Director Thomas Frieden and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius — later this month.
Children’s advocates say they’re also concerned that an influential CDC lead-prevention committee is being demoted, buried too far down in the federal bureaucracy to have any influence over public policy.
Last year, that committee led the CDC to revise its “action level” for lead in 2012, cutting in half the level of lead exposure that should prompt doctors to closely monitor children and take other actions, such as looking for and removing sources of lead in their homes.
Yet that historic change has had little to no practical effect, according to a July report from the National Center for Healthy Housing. Instead of treating more children, state and local health departments have been forced to make deep cuts to their lead-poisoning prevention efforts.
Federal funding for the lead program fell from $29.3 million in fiscal year 2011 to less than $2 million in fiscal year 2012.
The federal sequestration further cut funds for lead-control efforts, shrinking the budget to $1.8 million, according to the CDC.
Frieden has asked Congress to boost that funding to $5 million for fiscal year 2014. That budget is not yet final.
Children’s health advocates say the CDC is also silencing its independent group of lead experts, the Advisory Committee for Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention.
Under a “planned restructuring,” the influential advisory group will become a subcommittee of the board of scientific counselors at the National Center for Environmental Health, one of the centers that make up the CDC.
In the future, the lead advisory committee — which formerly reported directly to Frieden and Sebelius — could be overruled by the board of scientific counselors, whose primary task is typically to oversee external peer review of agency programs, says Rebecca Morley,executive director of the National Center for Healthy Housing, an advocacy group that works on preventing lead poisoning.
“The committee is in essence being disbanded,” said advisory committee member Megan Sandel, associate professor of pediatrics and public health at Boston University’s Schools of Medicine and Public Health. “The move itself strips the committee of all its scientific strength and credibility. I truly believe this is about silencing a committee. Without this being an official federal advisory committee, the CDC and HHS do not have to answer or respond to any of our advice. These committees were designed to be above politics and this move would strip our ability to speak and protect America’s children.”
Bernadette Burden, a spokeswoman for the CDC, says the advisory committee will remain the agency’s “go-to group” on lead-poisoning prevention.
The CDC’s commitment to protecting children from lead has not changed, Burden says.
“Preventing lead poisoning and eliminating lead in a child’s environment, that is still our first priority,” she says.

Census Survey Paints Discouraging Portrait of NJ’s Poor and Middle Class

NJSpotlight, Sept. 19, 2013
By Colleen O’Dea
The U.S. Census Bureau’s 2012 American Community Survey paints a picture of a state not even close to regaining the wealth and high-paying jobs lost during the 2007-09 recession: Median household income was essentially stable at $69,667, but the proportion of families living in poverty rose to 8.3 percent and more than 1.1 million people were without health insurance.
Continue reading here…

How Private Prison Companies Make Millions Even When Crime Rates Fall

Mother Jones, Sept. 19, 2013

We are living in boom times for the private prison industry. The Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation’s largest owner of private prisons, has seen its revenue climb by more than 500 percent in the last two decades. And CCA wants to get much, much bigger: Last year, the company made an offer to 48 governors to buy and operate their state-funded prisons. But what made CCA’s pitch to those governors so audacious and shocking was that it included a so-called occupancy requirement, a clause demanding the state keep those newly privatized prisons at least 90 percent full at all times, regardless of whether crime was rising or falling.
Occupancy requirements, as it turns out, are common practice within the private prison industry. A new report by In the Public Interest, an anti-privatization group, reviewed 62 contracts for private prisons operating around the country at the local and state level. In the Public Interest found that 41 of those contracts included occupancy requirements mandating that local or state government keep those facilities between 80 and 100 percent full. In other words, whether crime is rising or falling, the state must keep those beds full. (The report was funded by grants from the Open Society Institute and Public Welfare, according to a spokesman.)
All the big private prison companies—CCA, GEO Group, and the Management and Training Corporation—try to include occupancy requirements in their contracts, according to the report. States with the highest occupancy requirements include Arizona (three prison contracts with 100 percent occupancy guarantees), Oklahoma (three contracts with 98 percent occupancy guarantees), and Virginia (one contract with a 95 percent occupancy guarantee). At the same time, private prison companies have supported and helped write “three-strike” and “truth-in-sentencing” laws that drive up prison populations. Their livelihoods depend on towns, cities, and states sending more people to prison and keeping them there.
You might be wondering: What happens when crime drops and prison populations dwindle in states that agreed to keep their private prisons 80 percent or 90 percent full? Consider Colorado. The state’s crime rate has sunk by a third in the past decade, and since 2009, five state-run prisons have shuttered because they weren’t needed. Many more prison beds remain empty in other state facilities. Yet the state chose not to fill those beds because Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper and CCA cut a deal to instead send 3,330 prisoners to CCA’s three Colorado prisons. Colorado taxpayers foot the bill for leaving those state-run prisons underused. In March, Christie Donner, executive director of the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition, estimated that the state wasted at least $2 million in taxpayer money using CCA’s prisons instead of its own.
That’s just one example of how private prison companies keep the dollars rolling in, whether crime is rising or waning. Not surprisingly, In the Public Interest’s report calls on local and state governments to refuse to include occupancy requirements and even ban such requirements with new legislation. “With governmental priorities pulling public funds in so many different directions, it makes no financial sense for taxpayers to fund empty prison beds,” the report says.
To read the full report (16 pages), scroll to the bottom of the original article on the Mother Jones web site.

House Republicans Pass Deep Cuts in Food Stamps

N.Y. Times, Sept. 19, 2013

By Ron Nixon

WASHINGTON — House Republicans narrowly pushed through a bill on Thursday that slashes billions of dollars from the food stamp program, over the objections of Democrats and a veto threat from President Obama.

The vote set up what promised to be a major clash with the Senate and dashed hopes for passage this year of a new five-year farm bill.

The vote was 217 to 210, largely along party lines.

Republican leaders, under pressure from Tea Party-backed conservatives, said the bill was needed because the food stamp program, which costs nearly $80 billion a year, had grown out of control. They said the program had expanded even as jobless rates had declined with the easing recession.

“This bill eliminates loopholes, ensures work requirements, and puts us on a fiscally responsible path,” said Representative Marlin Stutzman, Republican of Indiana, who led efforts to split the food stamps program from the overall farm bill. “In the real world, we measure success by results. It’s time for Washington to measure success by how many families are lifted out of poverty and helped back on their feet, not by how much Washington bureaucrats spend year after year.”

But even with the cuts, the food stamp program would cost more than $700 billion over the next 10 years.

Republicans invoked former President Bill Clinton in their defense of the bill, saying that the changes were in the spirit of those that he signed into law in 1996 that set work requirements for those who receive welfare.

But Democrats, many of whom held up pictures of people they said would lose their benefits, called the cuts draconian and said they would plunge millions into poverty.

“It’s a sad day in the people’s House when the leadership brings to the floor one of the most heartless bills I have ever seen,” said Representative James McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts. “It’s terrible policy trapped in a terrible process.”

The measure has little chance of advancing in the Senate, and Senator Debbie Stabenow, Democrat of Michigan and the chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, called it “a monumental waste of time.”

The bill, written under the direction of the House majority leader, Eric Cantor, Republican of Virginia, would cut $40 billion from the food stamp program over the next 10 years. It would also require adults between 18 and 50 without minor children to find a job or to enroll in a work-training program in order to receive benefits.

It would also limit the time those recipients could get benefits to three months. Currently, states can extend food stamp benefits past three months for able-bodied people who are working or preparing for work as part of a job-training program.

“This bill makes getting Americans back to work a priority again for our nation’s welfare programs,” House Speaker John A. Boehner said.

The bill would also restrict people enrolled in other social welfare programs from automatically becoming eligible for food stamps.

In addition, the legislation would allow states to require food stamp recipients to be tested for drugs and to stop lottery winners from getting benefits. The Senate farm bill also contains a restriction on lottery winners.

Critics of the measure said the cuts would fall disproportionately on children.

“Yes, the federal government has budget problems, but children didn’t cause them, and cutting anti-hunger investments is the wrong way to solve them,” said Bruce Lesley, president of First Focus Campaign for Children, a child advocacy group.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, nearly four million people would be removed from the food stamp program under the House bill starting next year. The budget office said after that, about three million a year would be cut off from the program.

The budget office said that, left unchanged, the number of food stamp recipients would decline by about 14 million people — or 30 percent — over the next 10 years as the economy improves. A Census Bureau report released on Tuesday found that the program had kept about four million people above the poverty level and had prevented millions more from sinking further into poverty. The census data also showed nearly 47 million people living in poverty — close to the highest level in two decades.

Historically, the food stamp program has been part of the farm bill, a huge piece of legislation that had routinely been passed every five years, authorizing financing for the nation’s farm and nutrition programs. But in July, House leaders split the bill’s farm and nutrition sections into separate measures, passing the farm legislation over Democrats’ objections.

The move came after the House rejected a proposed farm bill that would have cut $20 billion from the food stamp program. Conservative lawmakers helped kill the bill, saying the program needed deeper cuts.